Not since Google plumped for pay-per-click sponsored listings in 2000 has ‘The Big G’ made a decision as strategically significant as its recent commitment to path-to-conversion reporting in the guise of ‘Multi-Channel Funnels'.

In my experience, the day of the week and hour of the day at which marketing emails are sent is often based on little more than the gut feeling of the email marketer and the performance of previous emails, rather than real data.

As someone who could put the anal in analytics, I think that's a rather inexact science. Surely there's a more accurate way to figure out whether the assumption is really true?

Some call it multi-touch attribution, others call it engagement mapping. Google calls it Multi-Channel Funnels and it has to be one of the biggest talking points in online marketing measurement circles today.

Whatever you want to call it, it is now live in limited pilot for some lucky Google Analytics customers.

However, inward traffic is only part of the picture, and with some additional tweaks it's possible to get a shedload of additional data on Twitter usage which could be used to further improve social media performance.

It has been a couple of years since we really started to make the most out of Twitter. Since then we have experimented with a live Twitter feed on our homepage and alongside our blog articles. We have hired a dedicated social media producer. And most recently we joined the Twitter Promoted Products beta.

I don’t want to talk about Promoted Products just yet, as we’re still making sense of things, but we’ve been using Google Analytics to measure Twitter since we started the @econsultancy account and I have a few insights to share. And some numbers too...

Google Analytics is used by a significant number of online publishers
and businesses to track how internet users are interacting with their
websites.

But data is data, and visualizing how Google Analytics data relates to
specific pages can be a difficult task. So last week, Google launched
In-Page Analytics, which it hopes will make Analytics more useful by
adding "visual context" to data.

Web analytics is still a missing art in many businesses, not just retail. Analytics is the last station on the investment train ride and is often compromised to pump more money into direct revenue generating digital marketing like PPC.

But why would any sane person put more money into something they don't fully understand and for which KPIs may not be optimised? It seems a strange decision.

My gut feeling is that there are too few optimisation specialists Client-side who really get web analytics 2.0. Dashboards are created and reports circulated to tick the analysis box yet limited insight is provided.

If conversion for referral traffic has dropped off the cliff, is that good or bad? I don't know. Even your data doesn't know but hidden within are nuggets of insight, you just need the focus and perseverance to find them.

This blog looks at a few examples of how data can be turned into insight to drive commercial decisions.

Some of the most talented search people in the business are in the UK market and although it’s relatively small there is a lot of competition. So if your campaigns aren’t being managed correctly, you could be falling behind.

Here are five ways you can assess your Pay Per Click (PPC) Agency, even if
you don't have direct access to your campaigns…